Advertisers Revisited - Administration

Now that we’ve tackled the publisher, it is time to focus on the most important piece of the phpAdsNew jigsaw: the paying advertiser.

In the first part, I showed you how to add an "advertiser," configure a "campaign" and upload a "banner," which, in turn, will be linked with the compatible "zones" created by the publisher(s).

Click on the "Add new campaign" hyperlink to view the following screen:

You should already be familiar with the concept of "AdClicks" and "AdViews." The screen shown above allows you to enter specific numbers, as it is common for Web masters to charge advertisers on the basis of these parameters.

Next, you can customize the "Activation" and "Expiration" dates for your campaign. No great shakes here. However, the next option, Priority, deserves special attention.

No points for guessing that this controls the manner in which the banners associated with the campaign are displayed. The options listed on the screen are pretty self-explanatory; however, you may want to take note of the "Campaign weight" parameter. The higher the value for a particular campaign among all "low priority" campaigns, the more likely that an associated banner will be displayed. This is just the kind of fine-tuning that you may need to meet the requirements of quirky advertisers!

The "Linked Zones" tab displays the publishers and zones that are compatible with the banners that can be associated with the current campaign. You will add the actual banners in the next step. Finally, the "Banner overview" screen displays all the "banners" that you (or the advertiser) have uploaded for the current campaign:

You’ve already seen the "Add new banner" screen in action. However, what I conveniently chose to skip were the different banner types that you can add. Now, click on the link to view a neat little drop down with the following options:

• Local banner (SQL): the most-commonly used option. It allows you to upload an JPEG or GIF image or Flash SWF file for the banner. There are some pitfalls associated with the use of Flash SWF files; you can find more information in the documentation that ships along with phpAdsNew.
  
  
• External banner: a convenient option if your advertiser opts to store banner images on his Web servers. All you need to do is point the banner to the URL of the required image file.
  
  
• HTML banner: this option allows you to enter HTML code for a banner. It comes in handy if the advertiser would like to display a simple HTML form in the banner.
  
  
• Text banner: this option displays plain, vanilla text. While it may be frowned upon by the creative among you, the overwhelming popularity of the Google AdSense program has rekindled huge interest in this delivery format.

Take your pick, or rather, your advertiser's pick, and proceed to add banners for the current campaign.

As you saw earlier for the zones, you have a "Campaign overview" screen that allows you (or the advertiser) to review the details of a particular campaign. Take a look:

On this screen, you can quickly add a new banner, review the "AdClicks" and "AdViews" for each active campaign, view/hide inactive campaigns and so on.